SEO, SEM, PPC and Marketing advice and opinions

SEM or search engine marketing is a process that involves generating visitors from the search engines and converting them into customers. Most people now have some sort of SEM strategy but many people do this wrong. 80% of companies don’t use their online marketing budget effectively. This is primary due to corporate ladder levels and people not actually having any idea what their doing, but still 80%!!! That’s a big number.

1.) Write your site for yourself, not for search engines and not users – Credit this idea to Tom from HQ SEO He talks about not worrying about search engines and just writing how YOU want to write, not even how users might want to read it.

2.) Titles and H1s – These are the biggest on page factors and in my opinion still the biggest factors to ranking a website in Google and the SERPs.

3.) Links links links – This is the 2nd biggest ranking factor, and Google although they claim they are getting away from links, are infact still huge on them.

4.) Use paid advertising up front – Online paid advertising (PPC) is best utilised to TEST a website and to get initial customers in. If you spend £100 to get 1 client but they pay you £20 a month for at least 1 year, its worth it. Even if you lose in the first 6 months but have 20 clients after that, this across the life of your business will be positive.

5.) Sort Cash flow – Taking the above method as an example, cash flow is super important. Don’t try and “get by” taking a large salary early and buying nice things. Invest and reinvest until your business starts to explode. Taking hundreds early might result in you losing millions later on. Some of the richest people in the world were once working for free on there business, even when they were profitable!

6.) Invest early – Again similar to the above point, investing to grow your business is not throwing away money. Even if you invest in something that doesn’t work, you have now tested this and know it doesn’t work. You won’t make the same mistake again and although I’m not the person who says “a loss is a lesson learnt” a loss can help you to make better decisions in the future.

7.) Be nice – A wise man once told me that “the best referrals are from word of mouth” – This is 100% true. If you have someone or a group of people who are actively promoting your business, JUST BECAUSE your good at what you do and a nice person they enjoy working with, you simply have the best sales team in the world. A motto I created is that no one can create a billion dollar business without word of mouth. Every single billion dollar business has utilised word of mouth marketing without even knowing it.

You’ve done it! You’ve created a website and an online business, so it’s time to refine its SEO. You probably have tons of questions on how to start and what to do, but fear not, this article will help you. Here are some tips that will help you get started with your SEO aspirations.

Patience is the name of the SEO game. Better rankings and increased traffic will not occur quickly. It may take several months, especially if you have a new website. As in a business you would run on offline, your reputation will take time to build.

Make a number of mini-sites that lead back to your main site. This way, each site can focus on one or two keywords and have a fully functional site that you can optimize and get traffic for, but serves a dual purposes since it will link back to your main website. The more mini-sites you have, the more point to your original site, and that will cause it to rise in the search engine page rankings. Backlinks are tough to rank, I recommend checking out: How to Value a Backlink or Backlink’s worth, both by Tom Buckland of SEO Oasis.

A web page meta tag is where you include a description of what the page is all about. Instead of just a few words like you would include in the title tag, the meta tag has room for a few well constructed sentences. For effective search engine optimization, don’t simply repeat what you already have in the title tag!

If your site has a defined set of categories, optimize the URLs on your site to contain the keywords associated with the categories. Say you have two categories, cats and dogs. Google likes it better if the URLs for such a site are mysite.com/cats and mysite.com/dogs as opposed to something like mysite.com?category=1. Even more importantly, people searching for a keyword associated with one of the categories are more likely to arrive at one of your subpages when you use a logical URL structure.

You must fully commit yourself to SEO for the long haul, if you want to achieve any positive results. Search engine algorithms are in constant change and what may have worked one day, may no longer be accurate the next. Prepare yourself with different tactics so that you are able to quickly resolve any problems, without fail.

For better search engine optimization, make use of the h1 tag. Use the h1 tag in your title, and make sure the title is somehow contained in the text. The h1 tag helps you focus directly on keywords. Also, make use of the h2 and h3 tags for more streamlined optimization.

Be very cautious when you link to content on other websites. While a direct link to popular or relevant contents can help your search engine optimization efforts, the owners of the site you link to may not appreciate it. The owners of content-rich sites (like those in news media) do not like visitors to access their content without seeing their homepage.

If you need your visitors to know something or to follow a certain set of instructions, make sure you’re providing this information. Some things you know might be obvious because you know them, but your customers might not have a clue. Always be thorough in your explanations if you want to prevent confusion and a mailbox full of questions.

Before you promote any product or service on your web site, be sure to try it yourself first. Check with other people who have used the product to see what they think about it and make sure the company is reputable. It’s much easier to honestly recommend something when you have first-hand experience with it.

If you run a website in multiple languages as part of an international business, optimize it properly for search engine indexing results by using separate copies of translated pages. There are translation solutions that rely on setting cookies and using dynamic links to provide multiple-language support, but they are inferior, for SEO purposes, to saving permanent stored pages in each language your website uses.

Now you should be much more prepared when it comes to SEO. If you thought that you were ready before, now you should be an expert! The tips in this article, provided you with advice to help you get started with SEO of your website.

Techniques for drawing search engines to your site are crucial to making your business visible on the Internet. Make your site more visible by following the guidelines from this article.

Techniques for drawing search engines to your site are crucial to making your business visible on the Internet. Make your site more visible by following the guidelines from this article.

Help search engines find you easily and you will rise in the ranks. Give web spiders directions on making their way around your site, and they will more easily pull up your page due to keywords. To help the spiders understand the hierarchy of your website’s pages, craft a site map highlighting the most important factors of your site.

As you develop URL monikers for individual pages, keep in mind that spiders cannot interpret session id titles or other similar strings of characters. The reason is because these things confuse the spiders. This is why the names of your URLs should be very meaningful. Aim to place a high-quality keyword somewhere in the URL to make it flow better.

View your competitors’ source codes. This can show you how they use SEO on their site and which keywords they use. Even though you might not want to imitate them, this research can help you think of different keywords and other things to try.

In order to really increase your PageRank, you need to not only get visitors to your site, but keep them there. Increasingly, evidence shows that the time a viewer spends looking at a website (per Quantcast scores and other measures)increases the page ranking. These will have an effect on the ranking of your page. Forums and other discussion services are a great way to keep your visitors on your site for longer.

Use descriptive title tags so that the search engines can easily find and read your content. Search engines only display 60 characters, so keep it short. Words past the 60-character point also tend to matter less to search engines.

Some owners of websites fail to proofread their content. Take the time to look over your website and make sure that everything is legible and correct for your readers, and for the search engines. If your website or keywords have bad grammatical or spelling errors, then search engines may rank your site lower than you’d like.

Consider moving into the podcast world. Podcasts, in either a video or audio format, are a great way to communicate with your customers with relevant information. They are becoming more and more popular with consumers so make sure that you hop on the band wagon. Doing this will allow the description of your podcast to appear. More information at: Ghost Marketing SEO Salisbury

Think about making a podcast. You can include both audio and video content in a podcast, just be sure it is content your users care about. Podcasts are becoming very popular with both users and webmasters. You simply need to grab a web cam and microphone, and start recording. Be sure to include a description of your podcast so the search engines can index it.

As good as your website may be, it can always be better. Once you accept this, and begin to look for any flaws in your design, you can improve upon them and maximize your business output. You should always be seeking to improve visitor numbers.

Research your potential keywords first. The keywords should be referenced throughout your website and in the titles of your articles. If you find out what keywords will attract people you are winning. In order to appear more on quality search engines, be sure to use this knowledge you have obtained.

Provide transcripts for video and audio content that you post to your site. Search engines will scan the transcripts and recognize keywords that are related to your site’s niche
Learning about social media marketing and utilizing the different platforms available really helps you with search engine optimization. This is more than Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp. There are a lot of specialized social media sites that cater to folks interested in things like photography or dog breeding. Participate on those that are directly relevant with your business.

Now that you have read this article, you should feel confident about using SEO. This is a lot of information, but at the very least, you know how to get started in improving SEO on your website. Also, you can reread it anytime.